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14 December 2016

Starting the post with a personal conclusion: I am so glad that I've decided a few months ago to sit out the whole US elections process on the fence. Only now I understand how any other move would have been dangerous for the puny remnants of my sanity. And how I would have been raving against my screen these days for or against this or other breach of elections' purity, popular vote, hacking, tampering, dark forces on this or another front etc. etc.

And even sitting on the fence, I have been somewhat swept by the wave of popular wrath directed at Moscow, who, according to so many pundits, swayed the result of the elections into that impossible direction. As a lot of other people, I have missed the point where the popular wrath against the popular and handy big bad wolf totally obscured the info that this bad wolf was (or wasn't, whatever) providing.

The author, John Schindler "is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer"*. He is definitely a man with an agenda, good or bad is not for me to say. I am not even remotely interested (for now) in the main thrust of his peace, no matter whether he is right or wrong. Something else caught my attention. Namely the two following quotes:

To anybody acquainted with well-honed Moscow agitprop techniques, this was no more than old-style KGB Active Measures sped up for the Internet age. That said, the threat posed by this online disinformation offensive is real, as I and other experts counseled years ago (in my case, beginning with the defection of Edward Snowden to Moscow in June 2013). However, it was frankly difficult to get the mainstream media interested in this rising problem—at least until the Kremlin’s disinformation machine went after Hillary, as it did in 2016 with gusto.

Notice the repeat appearance of the word "disinformation". Here is the second quote:

By refusing to debunk noxious Russian lies, Obama encouraged Putin to tell more of them—including about Hillary Clinton. This culminated in the Russian intelligence operation which employed Wikileaks as a front to disseminate Democratic emails which had been intercepted by Moscow—as I told you months ago, and which the National Security Agency has recently admitted.

Notice the words "noxious Russian lies".

And here it clinched for me. Ladies and gentlemen: when the best and brightest among you, pro-Hillary or pro-Trump no matter, apply the term "disinformation" aka "noxious Russian lies" to a great deal of totally valid information that was delivered into your hands gratis, whether by a well-meaning whistleblower or a bad conniving bastard in Moscow (or both), you all are guilty not only of a crime against an English dictionary, but of monumental, certifiable madness.

Disinformation: Misinformation that is deliberately disseminated in order to influence or confuse rivals (foreign enemies or business competitors etc.)

Information: A collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn.

So there. I feel much better now. And I continue my fence straddling meanwhile, not that we don't have our own elections looming. Get better soon, Americans, I have some vested interests in your sanity.